All Sorts and Conditions of Men: An Impossible Story

Angela hesitated.

"There are no carriages here," said the workman; "no footmen in powder or coachmen in wigs; there are no ladies on horseback, no great squares with big houses, no clubs, no opera-houses, no picture-galleries. All the rest of life is here."

"But these things make life," said the heiress. "Without society and art, what is life?"

"Perhaps these people find other pleasures; perhaps the monotony gets relieved by hope and anxiety, and love, and death, and such things." The young man forgot how the weight of this monotony had fallen upon his own brain; he remembered, now, that his companion would probably have to face this dreariness all her life, and he tried in a kindly spirit to divert her mind from the thought of it. "You forget that each life is individual, and has its own separate interests; and these are apart from the conditions which surround it. Do you know my cousin, Tom Coppin?"

"No: what is he?"

"He is a printer by trade. Of late years he has been engaged in setting up atheistic publications. Of course, this occupation has had the effect of making him an earnest Christian. Now he is a captain of the Salvation Army."

"But I thought – "

"Don't think, Miss Kennedy; look about and see for yourself. He lives on five-and-twenty shillings a week, in one room, in just such a street as this. I laughed at him at first; now I laugh no longer. You can't laugh at a man who spends his whole life preaching and singing hymns among the Whitechapel roughs, taking as a part of the day's work all the rotten eggs, brickbats, and kicks that come in his way. Do you think his life would be less monotonous if he lived in Belgrave Square?"

"But all are not preachers and captains in the Salvation Army."

"No: there is my cousin Dick. We are, very properly, Tom, Dick, and Harry. Dick is, like myself, a cabinet-maker. He is also a politician, and you may hear him at his club denouncing the House of Lords, and the Church, and monarchical institutions, and hereditary everything, till you wonder the people do not rise and tear all down. They don't, you see, because they are quite accustomed to big talk, and it never means anything, and they are not really touched by the dreadful wickedness of the peers."

"I should like to know your cousins."

"You shall. They don't like me, because I have been brought up in a somewhat different school. But that does not greatly matter."

"Will they like me?" It was a very innocent question, put in perfect innocence, and yet the young man blushed.

"Everybody," he said, "is bound to like you."

She changed color and became silent, for a while.

He went on presently.

"We are all as happy as we deserve to be, I suppose. If these people knew what to do in order to make themselves happier, they would go and do that thing. Meantime, there is always love for everybody, and success, and presently the end – is not life everywhere monotonous?"

"No," she replied stoutly; "mine is not."

He was thinking at the moment that of all lives a dressmaker's must be one of the most monotonous. She remembered that she was a dressmaker, and explained:

"There are the changes of fashion, you see."

"Yes, but you are young," he replied, from his vantage-ground of twenty-three years, being two years her superior. "Mine is monotonous when I come to think of it. Only, you see, one does not think of it oftener than one can help. Besides, as far as I have got I like the monotony."

"Do you like work?"

"Not much, I own. Do you?"

"No."

"Yet you are going to settle down at Stepney."

"And you, too?"

"As for me, I don't know." The young man colored slightly. "I may go away again soon and find work elsewhere."

"I was walking yesterday," she went on, "in the great, great church-yard of Stepney Church. Do you know it?"

"Yes – that is, I have not been inside the walls. I am not fond of church-yards."

"There they lie – acres of graves. Thousands upon thousands of dead people, and not one of the whole host remembered. All have lived, worked, hoped much, got a little, I suppose, and died. And the world none the better."

"Nay, that you cannot tell."

"Not one of all remembered," she repeated. "There is an epitaph in the church-yard which might do for every one:

"'Here lies the body of Daniel Saul —
Spitalfields weaver; and that is all.'

That is all."

"What more did the fellow deserve?" asked her companion. "No doubt he was a very good weaver. Why, he has got a great posthumous reputation. You have quoted him."

He did not quite follow her line of thought. She was thinking in some vague way of the waste of material.

"They had very little power of raising the world, to be sure. They were quite poor, ill-educated, and without resource."

"It seems to me," replied her companion, "that nobody has any power of raising the world. Look at the preachers and the writers and the teachers. By their united efforts they contrive to shore up the world and keep it from falling lower. Every now and then down we go, flop – a foot or two of civilization lost. Then we lose a hundred years or so until we can get shoved up again."

"Should not rich men try to shove up, as you call it?"

"Some of them do try, I believe," he replied; "I don't know how they succeed."

"Suppose, for instance, this young lady, this Miss Messenger, who owns all this property, were to use it for the benefit of the people, how would she begin, do you suppose?"

"Most likely she would bestow a quantity of money to a hospital, which would pauperize the doctors, or she would give away quantities of blankets, bread, and beef in the winter, which would pauperize the people."

Angela sighed.

"That is not very encouraging."

"What you could do by yourself, if you pleased, among the working-girls of the place, would be, I suppose, worth ten times what she could do with all her giving. I'm not much in the charity line myself, Miss Kennedy, but I should say, from three weeks' observation of the place and conversation with the respectable Bunker, that Miss Messenger's money is best kept out of the parish, which gets on very well without it."

"Her money! Yes, I see. Yet she herself – " She paused.

"We working men and women – "

"You are not a working-man, Mr. Goslett." She faced him with her steady, honest eyes, as if she would read the truth in his. "Whatever else you are, you are not a working-man."

He replied without the least change of color: